(Note to Admins: the following has nothing to do with DSL, let alone booting DSL without a floppy drive, but follows naturally from what lucky13 and I were talking about. Please let let me know if I'm doing anything inappropriate.)

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MissingM:

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I've also noticed that it's near-impossible to map some extensions to some applications in XP (.htm to any browser that's not IE, for example. Try it).

It's pretty easy to change defaults in XP. It was just as easy in NT and even in 95/98. Download and install any browser and on first use it will ask if you want it to be your default.

Okay, .htm was a bad example. I meant file associations, not default browser settings, which are actually pretty clear and straightforward.

And with that in mind, maybe I should `upgrade' to Win2000 as my second-choice OS. Note that he does say a few nice things about that one, even in mid-rant.

Actually, on the weight of this, and your positive experience with other versions, I did go and order a Win2000 CD off of eBay last night.

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Same thing with media players like WinAmp or (gag, what a bloated pig) iTunes.

Heh, fair enough. :-) I've got an older version, from the days before it got really huge.

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Right now I can't get direct access to the BIOS, and from what I could find online, that's a pretty common condition with Compaq Armada 1700 laptops.

I've never been a fan of Compaq because of some of their hardware quirks.

And rightly so, as I'm quickly discovering. Can't be too critical though, because it was a gift.

(My position, or guess at least, was that...)

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DSL, like Knoppix, like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE and others (please let's not talk about Linux XP...) are meant to offer a smooth entry-level learning curve. Kind of `Welcome to Linux!' systems.

Some people would disagree with that assessment. They're "easy" in the sense that you can boot them live on CD (or other devices). Ubuntu/Kubuntu (same thing, different desktops) is probably the most new user-friendly of the ones you named with respect to installing as a traditional OS with a lot of auto-configuration; Mepis is in the same league with Ubuntu, maybe a little "easier" even.

Well that's good news, because one other CD I've got coming in the mail is SimplyMEPIS 6.0 . And there's a FluxBuntu? Looks like I'll be starting a collection... (Anything that uses GNOME or KDE looks like it'll be a little out of my reach, or at the very least, irritatingly slow. So the FluxBox reference in another post caught my eye.)

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And KDE isn't a distro, it's a desktop environment with a full suite of applications in the tradition of Windows' and Mac's user environments.

No, and I should have mentioned it and GNOME separately, as kinder, gentler front-ends for whatever Linux (or even UNIX?) engine you choose to put under the hood. I tend to forget about GNOME because of its hardware requirements; doubt it'll run smoothly, maybe not at all on this machine.

Mepis is very KDE-oriented. You can add other window managers via apt-get/synaptic. You'll still have a lot of KDE stuff running in the background unless you start tinkering with it.

As far as Windows goes, I don't share the opinions expressed on the site you linked to. I used to administer NT servers and also used NT on workstation (still have an old 200 mhz box with NT workstation). I don't esteem NT twice as much as XP, nor would I only esteem XP twice as much as 3.1. I wouldn't give ME passing scores over XP. I don't know his baseline for such metrics, but the relationship between any OS and the hardware it's run on is paramount to any comparison.

Each progressive step Windows takes requires more resources -- just like Linux. You don't get fancy Aero graphics engines and you can't run Beryl without investing in more bleeding edge hardware required to run them. You can run XP and ME and NT on older hardware, but the resource-demand is much higher the more recent the version is. If running XP and ME on the same computer, I'd definitely expect ME to be more responsive but only because its system demands are significantly reduced.

The comparison between Win versions is similar to comparing different Linux distros on the basis of how they're configured and what they include (kernel version is a lot less important in this respect than everything else on top of it). DSL is blazing fast on all my computers compared to Mepis or Kubuntu -- as should be expected because DSL doesn't require the resources (RAM, hard drive space, CPU cycles) used by distros that cram their distros with every possible bell and whistle and start them all up by default. I have relatively minimal installs of Slackware and OpenBSD so they're also very responsive compared to something that installs KDE by default (though I did give in and add KDE to OpenBSD). I can run whatever I want on my newer hardware. I can't run KDE- or GNOME-based distros very well on the older ones. (Caveat: I still have older distro versions that were perfectly suitable for older hardware at the time of release and they're "faster" and more responsive than more recent, much larger, and more resource-hungry versions.)

This is way off-topic now. Reply via email if you want to continue.

--------------"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."-- meo (copyright(c)2008, all rights reserved)